Rough waters

I am frantic now trying to figure out the best way to edition two brand new artists' books before I leave in less than two weeks to teach in Boston. Here are the five dummies (the final one hasn't been bound yet) for the biggest bear of a book. Nothing has been quite as right as the very first one, but translating pencil scrawl and drawings to a computer and then back out again has been very, very challenging.

I had typed the text for the second dummy (the first I always do longhand) but friends preferred the handwriting, so I inked it once. Then I scanned, had to manipulate all the images to pull out the background, and re-set the text. I also had by then inked and scanned and manipulated and dropped the drawings themselves. Because I thought I wanted a different structure, I went to a machinemade paper (horrors, I know! But I had to test it). That meant re-sizing because I couldn't stand wasting so much paper to get the square-ish size based off of my hanji screen.

As expected it felt very sterile on the machinemade paper and too small. So then I had to resize the pages again. Also, the text was way too heavy because I only had a thick pen nib at home during the heatwave and didn't want to get more. Lesson: just go and get more! Because then I had to re-ink the text with a new pen.

And I thought the drawings were the hard part!!! They were not. I'm at the most difficult place now, where I'm pretty sure what I need to do but it will require one last big tweaking of the digital file and test print run. My printer loves to grab and crumple my paper, so I have to prepare for the worst. Everything else in my life feels like the worst, so all I can do is control are these pages, ink smears and all.